About the record boost and bury feature

Record boost and bury is a mechanism by which the ranking of certain specific records is made much higher or lower than other records.

Record boost is a mechanism by which certain specific records are ranked highly relative to others. Record bury is the opposite, that is, certain specific records are ranked much lower relative to others. This mechanism therefore lets you manipulate ranking of results in order to push certain types of records to the top or bottom of the results list.

The feature depends on the use of the stratify relevance ranking module.

Note: The record boost and bury feature and the stratify relevance ranking module are not supported by the Aggregated MDEX Engine (Agraph).

Feature assumptions and limitations

The following applies to the record boost and bury feature:
  • EQL (Endeca Query Language) is the language to use for defining which records are to be boosted or buried.
  • Using an EQL statement, you can specify a set of records to be returned at the top of the results list.
  • Using an EQL statement, you can specify a set of records to be returned at the bottom of the results list.
  • Record boost and bury functionality is available even when no record search is performed.
  • Record boost and bury is not supported by the Agraph.
  • Record boost and bury is supported by the Java and .NET versions of the Presentation API, as well as the MDEX API through XQuery (MAX).
Some use-case assumptions are:
  • This feature is expected to be used predominately with the Endeca Workbench and Page Builder products.
  • A common usage pattern will be to specify the records to be boosted/buried dynamically (per-query). Typically, this will be done through Merchandising Workbench/Publishing Workbench and Page Builder, where a second query will be performed when boost/bury is used.
  • Typical expectation is that only a handful of records will be boosted, that is, less than a page worth.
  • The number of records buried may be higher, but ordering within this group is less important.
  • If implemented for aggregated records, it is the base record ordering which will be affected by boost/bury.
  • A record will be stratified in the highest strata it matches, so boosting will have priority over burying.